Saturday, 21 December 2013

My faith in Scarlett Johansson is being tested by her recent fall-out with Oxfam

The question one circles round and round is this: what is
the relationship between crossdreaming and transsexualism? Crossdreaming may be
a symptom of transsexualism – there’s plenty of evidence of that – but there
are also crossdreamers who do not identify as transsexual (I number myself
among them). So we probably need to uncouple these two concepts – and rid our
minds of the suggestion that one is necessarily the cause of the other – before
gingerly putting them back together again.

My point of entry to the crossdreamer debate was reading
summaries of Professor Blanchard’s work. I found a couple of ideas there which I
grabbed hold of and held on to. One was the image of the ‘nonhomosexual’ male
who is sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a woman. The other was the
suggestion that this troubling state of mind could arise from an ‘erotic target
location error’ in early life. The first seemed to describe me, and the second
to explain how I had become what I am. I’ll return to the second in a future
post; for the moment, a few words about my evolving view of Blanchard, in whom
my early faith is faltering.

The best critique I’ve read of Blanchard’s work is an
article by trans activist Julia Serano.* She kicks off by noting that Blanchard
(and others after him) have used the term ‘autogynephilia’ to refer to two
significantly different phenomena. First, it’s used descriptively to denote a type or erotic fantasy common to many
(but not all) MtF spectrum individuals in which they become aroused by the idea
of being or becoming women. Second, the term is used theoretically to describe a ‘paraphilic’ model in which such
fantasies arise as a result of a misdirected heterosexual sex drive (the
‘erotic target’ being located within instead of outside the individual). Once
established, such fantasies become the primary cause of any gender dysphoria
and the desire to physically transition to female. As Serano notes, “conflation
between the descriptive and theoretical definitions of autogynephilia has led
to a great deal of confusion in the literature on the subject”. She cuts
through this by adopting the term “cross-gender arousal” in place of Blanchard’s
descriptive use of ‘autogynephilia’, and reserves the term ‘autogynephilia’ for
referring to the paraphilic model that Blanchard and others have proposed. I
find this eminently sensible.

“Nobody seriously doubts the existence of cross-gender
arousal,” Serano goes on. But, as her critique shows, approaches such as his based
on crude binary oppositions will never compass the complexities of this issue.
Take the matter of sexual orientation. Serano herself is consistently
‘gynephilic’. When she was male-bodied, the outside world would have identified
her as ‘heterosexual’, as a married man, but from the off she understood her
‘subconcious sex’ (her term) as female. From that perspective she was a
‘lesbian’ before transition, just as she is a female-bodied lesbian now. This
illustrates why dividing transsexuals, as Blanchard does, into ‘homosexual’ and
‘nonhomosexual’ based on their birth sex and then deriving separate aetiologies
on that basis, is a bankrupt procedure. His theory also fails to allow for
those transsexuals whose sexual orientation changes after transition.

Slowly I came to the belief that the only category to which
Blanchard’s thesis might apply is the ‘non-transsexual autogynephile’, the group
I felt myself part of.** Only with this group did it seem relevant to
categorise their sexual orientation in relation to their birth sex. (Since he
is unable to view transwomen as anything but men, Blanchard mistakenly thinks
he can apply the same typology of sexual orientation to anyone anywhere on the
transsexual spectrum.)

Riffing vaguely on his ideas, I arrived at the notion that
my fantasies were contained within an overall heterosexual structure – or perhaps
played out on a site of competing heterosexualities. The ‘man’ in me is hetero
– he is aroused by the thought and sight of women in the world around him – but
his strongest attraction is to an internalised (and probably idealised) woman.
This ‘woman’ in me is also hetero: as ‘her’ I’m in fantasy sexual relations
with generic, faceless men. The challenge is to turn competition into complementarity:
that way lies psychic balance.

Thus the M core can be hetero and the internalised F can be
hetero too. What follows is that, unlike M’s hetero desires, which are
precisely targeted on F, F’s own imagined hetero desires are much fuzzier in
expression – hence the recurrent ‘faceless man’ narrative. It has to be that
way, so that F’s ‘desires’ can coexist with M’s without conflict. We may
speculate that, in a bisexual, F’s ‘desires’ might fixate on an imagined
particular man with a face.

Latterly, I’ve started to question even this legacy of
Blanchardism. The subtle philosophers over at Crossdream Life have made me
pause at the boundary where ‘non-transsexual’ meets ‘transsexual’ and ask what
kind of a frontier it is. Are there border controls? Or is it porous?

If you’re perfectly secure in your belief that your crossdreaming
is not a symptom of transsexualism, then, fine and dandy. That point of view – my point of view hitherto – should be
respected. But it’s not unreasonable to suggest that a person test that
conviction by experiment. Because, sometimes, their assurance is misplaced. Serano has a useful take on this in her book Whipping
Girl. For someone in an uncertain state, she says, hormone treatment
resolves the uncertainty by confirming a truth about which they were unsure: “I
honestly was not 100 per cent sure that transitioning would ease my gender
dissonance until after my first few weeks of being on female hormones. The way
they made me feel, and the subsequent changes they brought about in my body,
just felt... right.” My guess is that, while the hormones might
artificially stimulate transgender feelings, if those feelings weren't “right”,
you'd end up with even greater “gender dissonance” than you had at the outset. If
your non-TS status is secure, then no amount of oestrogen is going to make you
into something you are not.

*‘The case against autogynephilia’, International Journal of Transgenderism, 12 (2010), 176-187
[available on her website at www.juliaserano.com].
See also the chapter ‘Pathological science: debunking sexological and
sociological models of transgenderism’ in her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of
Femininity (2007).

**The term is used by Blanchard’s disciple Anne
Lawrence in her book Men Trapped in Men’s
Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism (2013). Although she
devotes a separate chapter to this group, I can’t for the life of me see how
they differ from the ‘transsexual autogynephiles’ who form her main subject.
Indeed, the similarities are her stated reason for including them.

Tuesday, 10 December 2013

I write to understand. But shouldn’t this be a private act
only? If my ‘diary’ becomes a ‘blog’, I feel exposed: I feel I’m giving away my
secrets. Also, analysis is the enemy of desire. When I think about this too
much, I risk damming up the channels of pleasure and losing what the poet Blake
called the ‘lineaments of gratified desire’. Hitherto I’ve always written my
way out of my obsessions. Something
in me now baulks at such proceeding: this
obsession is too bound up with self-definition. I’ve no wish to elaborate new
theories of cross-gender arousal, to plough through a groaning pile of pseudo-scientific
papers, to account for the variousness of other people’s experience (especially
if it brings me into argument with vested interests). Nothing I write here will
have universal application. My wish is just to describe my own experience and
to make sense of it if I can, using as little theory as I can get away with.

It feels like having two souls in one breast, let’s call
them M and F. (I’m slightly uneasy with this polarization, since it depends on
essentializing gender distinctions, but that’s how I experience it and so, to
be honest about my feelings, that’s how I describe it.) F is everything that M
is not, which is why F is a refuge from everyday life as well as a source of erotic
excitement. M is remote from his emotions, intellectual and aloof, impatient
with his ugly body; F is in touch with her emotions, socially at ease, comfortable
in her attractive body, and enjoying her sexuality and the power it confers
over men.

I had always hoped that a ‘cure’ lay in forming adequate
external relationships which would enable me to integrate the F into the M, or
even suppress the internalized F. As I grew older, this hope seemed to recede
and I developed a carapace of self-sufficiency. Recently, I turned a corner. I’ve
learned to start celebrating my inner femme. Now she’s all dressed up with
somewhere to go –somewhere in my head, somewhere in cyberspace.

Because for me, as for so many crossdreamers, it all began
with the clothes…

I’ve no illusions that crossdressing is anything but sexual
for me. I’ve no interest in slouching around the house in casual female attire
doing ‘ordinary’ things. For me it’s more of an event, or a performance;
something I do every couple of weeks, look forward to, prepare for. It’s like
taking a vacation from myself for a day or two, passing through a door into
another personality; going to meet someone who is an embodiment of my ‘anima’.
And she has a distinct, youthful dress style, this other: ‘sexy’ but not
‘tarty’. ‘Dressing up’ is less important than it used to be, however; now I
think of it more as ‘undressing-up’, a minimal style of dress (hosiery used to
figure large – these days I prefer bare legs) which facilitates my inner crossdreaming
while also arousing me sexually as I feel soft materials caressing bare skin
and experiment with discarding them sensually as if in anticipation of sex with
a faceless man. Like wrapping and unwrapping a precious gift. But I’m also
fascinated by how the clothes connect me differently to a body from which I
otherwise feel alienated: when you put on a dress and high heels, your posture,
your gait, how you sit, automatically change.

I know some crossdreamers dislike the term ‘auto-eroticism’,
but that pretty much sums it up for me. I’m not motivated to go out ‘dressed’,
have no wish to meet other crossdressers, and suspect that the ridicule I might
attract from the non-TV onlooker would undermine what has become an important
source of emotional and sexual release for me as a single man living alone.

I shop generally in high street stores, because my female
other wants to wear fashionable clothes. I’ve tried mail order but have had
more misses than hits that way. Although I can’t try the clothes on, I need to
see them and feel the texture before purchase. Browsing was embarrassing at
first but I soon realised no one takes much notice; if they do, they probably
assume I’m buying for a partner or daughter. One exception is shoes, where my
big male feet prevent me from buying the lovely shoes I see in the shops. (A
girl can never have too many pairs of shoes!) Fortunately, there are specialist
suppliers online. I did once venture into a transvestite outfitter in England
(to buy a wig) – then I really did
feel embarrassed; there was an air of quiet desperation about the other
customers which made me scuttle out as fast as possible.

Tuesday, 3 December 2013

Who is she, my inner female? She remains the same age – in
her twenties – while I grow older. Over decades ‘she’ may function like Dorian
Gray’s portrait in the Oscar Wilde story, but in reverse – remaining unchanged while ‘he’ grows
older. The result, when crossdressing, when struggling to embody her, is that I’m
wearing clothing inappropriate for a woman of my own age. Perhaps that’s part
of the thrill. The teenage kick of hearing a reproving inner voice say, “You’re
not wearing that, young lady!”

She is so much more than a perfect body. Of course, she has
all the physical characteristics I most like in a woman, but she also has a
name and a ‘personality’. She’s intelligent and educated and witty. She cries
when she’s down (and sometimes when she’s up). She has a sharp dress sense. She
even has a ‘job’, although it changes from year to year, depending on my
current interests. Yes, she’s a great f*** – as her partners would confirm –
but she’s more than a f***-doll. Yet her essence remains indeterminacy, a
capacity to mutate as my imagination pleases, even as certain characteristics,
like her age and stunning figure, remain fixed. I suspect my mind rounds out
her ‘personality’ as a way of legitimising the hold she has on my attention. I
don’t know whether this strategy sets a ‘parameter’ on her existence, or just
the opposite. Given that her presence, however welcome, has got in the way of
my forming relationships for over twenty years now, I fear that she’s the one
calling the shots.

‘Dabrela’, I should explain, is not her real name; it’s an intersex name that she and I use for our joint communiqués.
Her real name must remain secret; for names, as shamanic religions the world
over teach, confer power. That praenomen is like a spell which I utter to
summon up her presence. Once, I created a profile in her real name on a social
media site. Big mistake, I discovered. First, after the initial frisson, I felt
guilt in misleading people, who clearly thought they were talking to a
flesh-and-blood woman. (Interestingly, the online penpal who was most
persistent in trying to fix up a date was a self-declared lesbian!) Second, I
jeopardised the autonomy of fantasy and the scope for updating my crossdreams
to hit new erotic pressure-points. In replying to correspondents’ questions, I
had to create a consistent back-story for my female self, which then became
imprisoning.

This I know: there has to be a division between the desiring subject and the desired object. In ‘normal’ circumstances, those are two different people, so the distinction is clear. In crossdreams, where the relationship is internalised, it’s more complicated. Blanchard posits that the transsexual’s motivation in transitioning is to physically ‘become’ the object of his desire. But would anyone truly want to do that? If you subjectivise the object, it ceases to be an object; and what then happens to the desiring subject?

Monday, 2 December 2013

A life can be haunted by
what it never was
If that were merely glimpsed.
- Louis MacNeice, ‘Selva Oscura’

As far back as I can remember, my life has been haunted by
what it never was. My mother, a fabulous woman but a slave to convention, used
to say, ‘What makes you think you’re different?’
And as a child and adolescent I had no answer to that question. I didn’t know
what made me different, but I knew that something did. Through my early manhood
I pursued the goals I was expected to pursue – dating girls, or at any rate
falling romantically in love with them and projecting my unreal expectations
onto their unsuspecting shoulders.

Over the years I’ve had several short-term relationships but,
when the scene moved to the bedroom, I could never really ‘perform’. Faced with
this response, women assumed that I must be gay and either didn’t realise it or
was in denial. Was this the thing that made me ‘different’? I didn’t think I was
gay because I knew that I was only aroused by the sight of, and by images of,
women. Yet when I looked at those pictures (and masturbated over them) my fantasy
was not to possess the woman but to be
her, to be the sexy creature who could arouse these feelings in a straight man.
Likewise, in fantasy, I imagined a penis penetrating me as a woman, but asa man I had no homosexual fantasies
about other men.

As I entered my thirties, still hoping to find ‘Ms Right’
but beginning to suspect she wasn’t ‘out there’ at all but ‘in here’, I got seriously
into crossdressing. Always in private, it was perhaps an outlet for my aborted
sexual desire. This remains my leisure activity of choice. Now, however, it’s
less about the clothes – literally so, these days I favour the flimsiest,
skimpiest dresses – and more about the body underneath, shaved and moisturised
and perfumed.

None of this made any sense until the internet opened up new
worlds. Surfing the Net a couple of years ago in search of answers, I stumbled
on the term ‘autogynephilia’. Literally meaning ‘love of oneself as a woman’,
this term was introduced by Canadian psychologist Ray Blanchard in 1989. He
defined it as ‘a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of
himself as a female’. In his theory, this was a common characteristic of what
he called ‘nonhomosexual’ male-to-female transsexuals, and he went on to
speculate that these transsexuals’ desire for sex reassignment was directly
linked to their ‘autogynephilic’ urge to be female.

Was this me? Well, picking over Blanchard’s ideas with my
rationalising ‘male’ brain, I’ve decided there is something to be salvaged from
this theory. Just what that is, and where I think he goes wrong, will be a
subject for future posts. Jack Molay, a staunch critic of Blanchard, has proposed
an alternative concept which he calls ‘crossdreaming’, a looser term that
allows room for a wider variety of gender variance, including drag queens,
gender queer, and female-to-male transsexuals. I find both terms useful.

This blog will mix description and analysis, celebration and
self-doubt, autobiography and a bit of hard theory. I hope you’ll join me for
the journey(s).